This is a question for those that know. Do the security agencies have a way to monitor private replys on this and other forums on the internet? If not, we may have a security breach that has not been addressed.

Just my two cents, but NSA heavily monitors e-mail generally, bulletin boards, and other traffic.

I think the private mail function here is not likely to be well monitored officially. There is so much net traffic that analysis is a black art of higher mathematics and computer programming.

The Free Republic private mail is readily accessible to anyone having access to the servers, of course. An official request could log all traffic through any node.

A very little spycraft makes interception fairly useless anyway. The scientific data files in particular could hide the Library of Congress within them with every few days of traffic. I guess the point I am making is that this cat in particular is pretty much out of the bag.

9
posted on 01/18/2004 3:25:07 AM PST
by Iris7
("Duty, Honor, Country". The first of these is Duty, and is known only through His Grace)

"If anyone can sign up on a forum and use the private reply option without being detected or monitored, it could be a serious breach of security."

My reply:

We need to immediately open up all our email to whatever police agencies want to see them. Then we need to open up our homes and cars to whatever agencies need to see them.

Then, after they have unlimited access to our emails, homes, cars and private property, it will be time to give them access to our private conversations and thoughts.

We can record weekly Political Thought Diaries, in which we write down all non-correct political thinking, and record our private conversations with neighbors, friends and co-workers.

Great care should be taken that we record the non-correct Political Thinking of all our friends, family and co-workers, as the Party Political process needs the discipline of rigorous monitoring by politically correct Party Members.

We can also gather in huge tribunals, confessing our sins to The State, criticizing our impure thoughts and criticizing our neighbor's impure thoughts.

Hopefully by then The State will have erected Re-Education Camps where our thoughts and motives can be purified.

Well, I've never had anyone actually come to my door. Now, there's this black van that parks across the street a lot. Has all black windows and a whole bunch of antennas and micro dish looking stuff. Nah... probably nothing to worry about.

A very little spycraft makes interception fairly useless anyway. The scientific data files in particular could hide the Library of Congress within them with every few days of traffic. I guess the point I am making is that this cat in particular is pretty much out of the bag.

The NSA and others was able to intercept radio and cable signals and, by dint of math and keen intellect, psych out the meaning of some of it. They used computers, back when hardly anyone else did--when IBM didn't think there was a market from more than a half a dozen of them.

Now that the communications traffic has exploded the way it has, I find it difficult to believe that sophisticated bad guys' email can even be detected. Things like Public Key Encryption are readily available which make a message look like a perfect hash almost as thoroughly as the Germans and Japanese thought they were doing--and people now routinely use that for legitimate business reasons, so you can't just take for granted that an encrypted message is an Al Qaeda message. And if you undertake heroic efforts to crack one message out of all that traffic, it probably turns out to be an honest citizen with a tinfoil hat on, just protecting his privacy.

Certainly it might be a serious problem--but unless you're willing to pull the plug on modern communications and turn in your computer to the government, it's pretty much a "them is the conditions that prevail" situation.

Try to actually think about what you say. The NSA does not monitor emails "heavily" or otherwise. How could any agency possibly monitor millions and millions of emails a day? It's ridiculous. Certain key words and phrases are supposed to trigger a flag somewhere, in some system, but if it works like the usual government venture...you'll be safe from the jack-booted, G-men.

Geez! I wish the feds were as efficient as the tin-foilers thought. Maybe 3000 New Yorkers would be alive for the new year.

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